


Headlights Shine at the End of the Tunnel

by SucculentStrawberries



Series: Omovember - 2020 [4]
Category: Doom Patrol (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Awkward Conversations, Bed-Wetting, Childhood Trauma, Denial of Feelings, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Embarrassment, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Language, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Multiple Personalities, Omorashi, Omovember, Pre-Relationship, Psychological Trauma, Robot/Human Relationships, Secret Crush, Situational Humiliation, Some Humor, Spoilers, Takes place in s1 but after the Underground episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:08:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27505090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SucculentStrawberries/pseuds/SucculentStrawberries
Summary: (Omovember 2020. Day 24- Bed-Wetting)Jane is pissed at herself, at the world, at the fucking monster who she refuses to name... She's also pissed the bed. At fucking 69 years old, give or take. Goddamnit.This sucks. She sucks, her life sucks, and she bumps into the one fucker she doesn't want to see. But... maybe he sucks just a little less. Even if he's fucking awful at trying to do anything useful.If a bundle of fuckups deserve the comfort of anyone, it should be someone almost equally fucked up...
Relationships: Cliff Steele/Crazy Jane
Series: Omovember - 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999039
Kudos: 5





	Headlights Shine at the End of the Tunnel

**Author's Note:**

> Look at that, I finally wrote something for my favourite show on earth after hoarding unfinished drafts for two years! Just a quick thing this time but at least I finished one haha
> 
> It was intended to be fluffier/more emotional but Jane refused to open up to me this time, oops. So enjoy awkwardness, denial, and banter instead c':
> 
> I'm assuming this takes place sometime in s1 , but after The Underground episode! Things about 'Jane's' past are vaguely referenced but not described in depth! The tags make this fic look a lot darker than it is to be honest, but I wanted to cover my bases.
> 
> Happy omovember, I hope you all enjoy!

Jane wasn't sure what woke her up first- at least, first  _ this time _ , after the last three times her consciousness had been pulled back to the world of the living. Was it the fact that she was drenched in a layer of sweat? The way her bloodshot eyes ached and burned? Or had it been a noise? She dragged a hand down her face and squinted, peering around the room.

Fitful sleep wasn't unusual for her, and the nightmares even less so. They didn't really bother her anymore though. At this point, she's had most of them so many times she was practically numb, could recite them scene by scene without so much as a shiver. It didn't matter anyway. They're just dreams, for fucks' sake. 

But every so often, there were the rare ones that managed to surprise her. The nightmares she'd never seen before, or worse, the ones she'd tried her best to block out. Those were the worst, and she always knew in her gut when she'd had one, because there was a heavy pit in her stomach.

And that pit was only noticed a moment before she realized her lower half was way too damp to just be sweat. Feeling around under the blankets confirmed the wet patch underneath her, still soaking into the bed. Warm fabric clung to her like a second skin.

" _ Fuck… _ " The tired curse escaped from her exhaled breath, her eyes momentarily rolling back to search the ceiling for whichever bullshit deity had decided to torment her tonight. Finding no such culprit, her resentment was swiftly channeled elsewhere, and she stormed out of bed in a flurry of swearing, yanking any scrap of fabric she could reach. "Fuck!  _ Fucking  _ **_fuck!!!_ ** " They managed to keep Hammerhead from shredding the bedding entirely, but she couldn't bring herself to care about the goddamn fitted sheet, gritting her teeth and tugging with white knuckles until the two furthest corners tore open, sending the rest of the elastic bullshit snapping back in a misshapen ball. Those stupid things weren't worth the fucking effort to put on anyway, they were always such a pain in the ass. She'd rather take a cactus up there than put that shit back on. Fuck it. 

Fuck this shit. Fuck  _ her _ .

Her nails scratched her skin in her haste to claw her sodden outfit off, leaving angry pink lines in their wake. She had more than half a mind to keep clawing, digging and pulling chunks off until she could rip out whichever broken part of her was responsible for this mess. 

_ 'We deserve this... We deserve to bleed...' _ The Hangman's Daughter sighed, ever the fuckin' cheerleader.

_ 'We're so totally, like, revolting! No one's  _ **_ever_ ** _ going to love me like this!' _ Karen wailed, her mascara running and ugly duck lips trembling in a pout. 

" _ Shut up, _ you pussies…" she grumbled under her breath, ignoring them and pulling on a pair of old boxers and a baggy black sweatshirt. No sense pulling clean sweatpants over sticky legs, and the top was long enough to cover her. Snatching up the bundle of reeking laundry, she craned her neck to see past it and trudged towards the door. 

Biting back a yawn, she made her way through the darkened hallways of the manor, grateful that she didn't have her boots on to echo against the vast walls and ceilings. She kept her bag-ringed eyes peeled for the Negative Spirit floating around, or Rita glooping and glopping her way towards the kitchen for a late night rotisserie chicken (or three), but the hallways were blissfully empty and silent. If the Chief was, for whatever reason, awake, he'd be down in his workshop, so she didn't have to worry about him and his annoying habit of popping up behind her with advice. Not that he'd really have any advice left to give after the amount of times they'd been through this bullshit…

She shook her head, quickening her pace down the spiraling staircase, only guiding herself by the railing under one hand, her other straining to hold the bundle.

It'd been nearly  _ a year _ this time. Not that she'd ever expected to keep a perfect record, God knows she couldn't manage a freaking perfect anything, but she'd thought she could  _ at least  _ qualify for a fucking gold sticker or some other tryhard crap. A goddamn smiley face in a notebook, a shitty pat on the back. A _ 'Congrats, bitch, you've barely met the threshold for a functional human being!' _ . Goddamn it. God-fucking-damnit.

She was too old for this. All but  _ one _ of them were too fucking old for this shit.

But it couldn't be fixed. Not by them, at least, because they weren't capable of fixing fucking anything. A bunch of broken fuckups couldn't do anything but fuck up the same shit over and over and-

" _OW!_ _MOTHER_ ** _FUCKER_**!" 

Her train of thought, as well as her body, had rammed straight into a wall, and promptly crashed to the floor, her back hitting the edge of the final stair. As piss-stained fabric scattered through the air and rained back down like shameful confetti, she peeled the black thong off of her head and flung it aside. It did not crack the wall like the sheer force of her frustration should have, but instead slapped against it before dropping to the floor with an anticlimactic, slightly-wet flop. 

She directed her fury towards the wall she'd rammed into instead, which was now staring down at her with those fucking ugly red headlights and giant dipshit expression. God, she wished he had junk to twist and shove back up the stupid fucking asshole he also needed to have. Hammerhead wanted to ram it so far up it'd come back out that big dumb jaw. 

" **_WHAT THE HELL, CLIFF!?!_ ** " She caught the fact that she was yelling a second too late, snapping her jaw shut and biting her tongue with a muffled shriek of homicidal urges. When she listened past her pounding heartbeat and determined that the other dipshits were still, by the grace of no fucker in particular, asleep and away from their vicinity, she resumed her snarling at a lower volume, squinting at him in the red glow. "What the fuck is the matter with you!?! You aren't the fucking  _ Tin Man, _ asshole, you don't have to stand around all rusted waiting for a bitch to show up! What the hell are you even  _ doing _ , lurking here at the end of the fucking stairs?!! Goddamn creep!"

"Hey! Hey, I am _not_ **_'lurking!'_** " He attempted to raise his hands, the scrap metal that passed for fingers squeaking and grinding as they struggled to curl into air quotes. "I- I'm just- A guy can _stand,_ can't he? Stand anywhere he damn well pleases! I got sick of standing in my room, so I moved out here! Where there's more… more... changes in scenery!"

"So you  _ do _ just wait here for someone to come down!?! Just stand in the dark for hours like some abandoned puppy? God, you're so fucking clingy!"

'Changes in scenery.' God, he was  _ pathetic _ , almost as pathetic as she was. Desperate for company and attention. If she wasn't in such a shitty mood, she'd be tempted to laugh. Maybe cock her head and coo at him with a mocking 'awww'. Oh, he'd be so pissed at that.

"Well- Whatever! Shut up!" Cliff pouted, crossing his arms with a clank. ""At least I'm  _ supposed _ to be up this late! I can't fuckin' sleep! Literally! What's  _ your _ excuse, huh? Sneaking around, doing whatever weird shit you- whichever one of you-'s always up to…" Jerking his head to pass for an eyeroll, he cocked his head at her, holding a hand out. "Can I help you up?"

" _ No. _ " she deadpans, glaring at him with all the disdain she can muster until he turned away. It was just her fucking luck to run into this clown. The sooner she got him to fuck off, the better.

As she was pushing herself to her feet, refusing to wince at the ache in her back, a jolt of horror shot through her. In the whopping few seconds she hadn't given him her attention, the rusted asshole had stomped his way over to one of the piles scattered around, reaching down to grasp at a pair of sleep pants.

"Don't touch that!" she called out a little too shrilly, lunging forwards. His stupid fingers had already pulled it off the floor, fumbling and creaking as they found their grip. 

"Hey, if I knocked your ass to the floor, the least I can do is pick up this shit for ya'!" 

"That's not the point, damnit!" God, her face felt hotter than Flaming Katy's. "You can't-  _ It's got piss on it, dipshit! _ "

"Wait, _what?!?_ " If Cliff had eyebrows, they would have shot up. Instead, those round red lights merely stared at the fabric and then at her, his head rotating back and forth with increasingly loud creaks. " _What the fuck!?!_ Ew, get it off! Get it off me! _Fuck!_ " His hand flailed, but the pants merely flapped around like a flag advertising her misfortune, caught between the rusted hinges of his fingers. "You know I can't feel or smell shit! Why the hell would you let me touch it!?! **_Motherfucker!_** It's _stuck!_ "

_ Stop being such a baby! _

That was what she wanted to snap at him while she stormed over to grab the stupid pants, uncaring if she ripped one of his digits off in the process.

Instead, she found herself frozen where she stood, her arms curling in to hug herself as her lip trembled. The familiar shift in the air around her was coaxing tears into the corners of her eyes, and her breath hitched for a split second before she forced her mouth shut.

_ No, stop it!  _

_ 'B-But he knows! He knows how p-p-p-pathetic we are! He's g-going to hate us! It's all our fault, we can't do anything right!'  _ Penny continued to snivel and whimper, but her stuttering was drowned out by increasingly shrill wailing. Her head began to pound.

_ 'The big robot man's scary!!! He's mad! You know what happens when they get mad! He's gonna hurt us! He's gonna hurt us because we've been bad!' _

_ He's not like that, Baby Doll! _

_ 'Yes he is! Remember, in the puppet place? Or when the rat was in him? Tell him we're sorry, please! Tell him we didn't- we didn't  _ **_mean to!'_ ** Baby Doll sobbed, pulling at her in an attempt to get her to crumple to the floor. She forced her trembling legs to stay upright, squeezing her eyes shut.

_ No. No! Both of you shut up! Shut the fuck up and get back down there! _

They were  _ not _ going to cry in front of this fucker like a little pussy-ass bitch. He wasn't going to get to play the savior again, they were  **done** with that! He didn't get to swoop in and say some stupid joke and fumble around trying to help her like a big clueless dipshit. She'd dealt with this shit all her life. She could handle it  _ just fucking fine _ on her own.

She didn't need Chief. She didn't need him.

All she fucking needed was to throw this shit in the goddamn laundry.

"Jane?" God, she was  _ so sick _ of hearing her name spoken in that stupid echoed voice. "Shit, Jane, what's up? Or is it one of you? Penny? You're shaking."

" _ Fuck off, _ before I fuck you up." she hissed, rubbing at her temples to try and regain a scrap of clarity amidst the clusterfuck of noise in The Underground. 

"Hammerhead?"

" _ Jane. _ " she snarled, opening her eyes and reaching out to untangle the pants from his hinges. "Jane can get pissed at you too, dumbass.  _ There _ , it's out." Turning away, she avoided any further eye contact, busying herself grabbing the rest of the mess around them. "You're free. Go clean your fingers, wander into a trash compactor, I don't care. Just leave me the hell alone." She wished her voice hadn't wavered, but consistency was hard to achieve when you were constantly being screamed at by a bunch of cowardly morons.

"Hey, if it helps…" Cliff was very clearly  _ not _ fucking off, stomping over to overtake her view again. He cocked his head in what she assumed was supposed to represent a smile. "Drunk pissing the bed's no big deal. I've done it  _ soooo _ many fuckin' times, it isn't the end of the world.  _ Hah! _ One time in 1976, I'd just won the Daytona, right? And I partied  **_HARRRRDDDD_ ** . I'm talkin' keg stands, jagerbombs, this group of bangin' chicks I met offered to line up and let me drink tequila shots out of their belly-"

"I  _ wasn't _ drunk." she ground out through a jaw that was ready to crack, shoving past him to start snatching up the fallen sheets. Normally, she liked hearing about all the fucking disgusting shit he'd done in his hayday. It was great fuel to torment him with later, and it sure beat the snooze-fests that were Rita and Larry's somber, self-pitying drivel. But right now, his voice was the last thing she wanted to hear.

" _ Ohhhh _ . Gotcha!" Cliff nodded, giving her a thumbs up. "So high then. I get that. Some good kush  _ always _ made me have to piss like a  _ motherfucker- _ "

"I wasn't high either." Her temples ached, and she kept her gaze on the last bits of the pile she was gathering back into a ball. "Do me a favor, dipshit. Stop trying to comfort me with 'relatable stories'. This isn't some fucking magic bonding moment. We aren't hanging out. I fucking pissed the bed like some goddamn three year old.  _ That's it. _ "

"You know…" Cliff's fingers clanked as he steepled them together, tapping them against each other. He stared at them for a while, and she could practically hear the sparks fizzling inside as he struggled to find his memory. "When Clara would piss the bed sometimes-"

And  _ of course _ it was a Clara story, because it was  _ always _ a fuckin' Clara story. How many times did she have to tell him she didn't want to hear about his stupid daughter? 

"Whatever you're about to say, Cliff, I'll cram it right back down your fucking throat." 

_ I'm not your fucking daughter! I'll never be your stupid goddamn daughter!  _

"It's not the same. Whatever goddamn motivational bullshit or comfort you're about to try on me, it isn't gonna fucking work." Clara was a  _ normal _ kid with normal kid problems. Clara'd definitely grown out of it. Clara wasn't still trapped in a clusterfuck of bullshit every fucking night.

Doctor Harrison was tempted to launch into an explanation of  _ exactly _ how and why their problem was nothing like Clara's, with clinical terms that definitely wouldn't sink past Cliff's dusty old brain container. She made sure to put a stop to that before she could open her mouth. Cliff had seen enough of her past in the Underground to put the pieces together if he wanted to… But she really hoped he never would. 

"Actually, I was gonna say… I dunno what to do. Or what to say to you." Cliff murmured, and despite her desire to march off towards the laundry room and just leave him there, she found herself stopping to glance up at him. "I wasn't really…  _ around _ most nights, y'know? And even when I was, I was fuckin' useless. So the nanny or Kate usually took care of that shit…" he made whatever noise resembled a sigh, shaking his head. 

"So don't say or do anything. Walk off and pretend this shit never happened."

"I don't think I can do that, Jane."

"Why the fuck not?" 

"Well, because I'm  _ fucking bored _ , for one." Cliff huffed, holding up one finger. "So I need something to do,  _ anything _ to do, before I lose my goddamn mind waiting for everyone else to get up! And my mind is literally the  _ only _ thing I have left to lose, so I'd like to fucking hold onto it,  _ thank you! _ " He stomped closer, clumsily reaching over and attempting to snatch the ball of laundry from her grip. It reminded her of every failed claw-machine attempt she'd ever seen. "And  _ two _ , even though you hate when I imply it, you're the only person here that's cool enough for a cool guy like me to talk to! And  _ I fucking care _ about you! So let me do your goddamn laundry!"

Goddamn. At this rate, the asshole was going to wake everyone up with his fucking idiotic attempts at compassion. It was the 'Therapy' chant all over again, but without the rat. The rat would probably come up with a better idea than this.

"Fine! Fuck it, if you're  _ so _ desperate to feel freakin'  _ needed!  _ Here!" She shoved the heap into his fumbling grip, trying to ignore the heat covering her face. "Just  _ quiet down, _ fuck!" she hissed. "Do you even know how to  _ do _ laundry? Or did your mom, wife, and side-piece do everything?"

"I'm a grown man!"

"Didn't answer the question."

"I- Listen! It can't be fuckin' rocket science! I'll figure it out!"

That wasn't reassuring. But the mental image of Cliff screeching and banging at a washing machine and being drowned in bubbly overflow was as amusing as it was frustrating, so she guessed she'd take her chances and let it play out. It was the only way to get the needy asshole off of her back anyway. Give him this dumb busywork, and then she could try to calm down and forget this shit. Maybe roll a joint in the bathroom to smoke in the tub. 

Brushing some strands of hair out of her face, she turned to grab the railing. "I'm going upstairs to scrub off. You come up there, I'll smash that ugly helmet in until your brain comes leaking out of it."

Cliff nodded. She was slightly annoyed to see his head standing proudly above the pile, which looked much smaller when _ a fucking giant  _ was carrying it. "Privacy. Got it. No problem."

"And don't fuck up my shit."

"No promises."

"And Cliff?"

"Yeah?"

"I guess if I had to smack into any of you assholes tonight… I'm not entirely pissed it was you."

" _ Awwww~ _ " Cliff cooed, tilting his head. How was he able to smile without even having a moveable mouth? Stupid robot…

"You tell anyone about any of this, and I'll make sure Chief won't be able to put you back together."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed the fic, please feel free to leave a comment (anon is also fine) or kudos! I love hearing from you all! ❤


End file.
